For the orphans, a nightmare forever

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Samantha DiMartino, left, with older sister Daniella, right, and their cousin Jacqueline. The sisters lost mother Debra on September 11. They have built a shrine for her.Picture:NYT

September 11 is a recurring nightmare for thousands of kids, writes Andrea Elliott.

The bone brought sad
finality to everyone but
Brendan Fitzpatrick.

It was proof that his
father had died on September
11, 2001. But for Brendan, who
is five, news that a piece of
Thomas Fitzpatrick's humerus
had been recovered was vexing,
at best. "Can we get all the
pieces and put them together?"
he asked his mother at their
home in Tuckahoe, New York.

"So he could be alive?"

In Harlem, a different
puzzle unfolded for Samuel
Fields. He was 10 when the
towers collapsed, and knew his
father was gone. But he could
not cry. He jumped off the
steep rocks in Central Park,
punched a classmate and
wound up in jail for pelting
cars with stones. It was only
then — after his mother yelled,
"Would your father want this?"
— that the first tears fell.

Brendan Fitzpatrick and
Samuel Fields belong to the
vast tribe of young children
who lost parents on September
11 — an estimated 3000 boys
and girls who are all working
through their own painful
puzzles of bewilderment and
sorrow. From the start, there
were grim forecasts for this
group, and rumours: there
would be scores of orphans,
permanent trauma, a generation
forever marred.

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Charitable foundations were
set up, scholarships created.

But, for all the dark assumptions
and the outpouring of
sympathy and money, the children
of the dead receded from
public view. Their families protected
them. Journalists shied
away from them. Social workers
struggled to find them. And
psychotherapists confronted a
novel clinical challenge: how to
treat children who have suffered
a loss so brutally intimate
yet spectacularly public.

Trauma experts set out to
study the group, but struggled
to diagnose what they encountered.

Even identifying the
children, determining how
many there were and where
they lived, took years.

Only now is a portrait of the
children emerging. They cut
across social, ethnic and racial
lines but share similarities:
most lost a father, and a
majority of the children were of
primary school age or younger.

If the father who died
coached soccer, chances are
his son stopped playing. School
is avoided on the anniversary.
A low-flying plane can send
hearts racing. Television is a
minefield. Work is identified
with death. Many surviving
parents have quit their careers.

With four studies under
way, it is too soon to know the
full effect of September 11 on
its legacy of bereaved children.

Some of the children appear
quite resilient, while others are
visibly struggling. But patterns
have surfaced, ranging from
symptoms of anxiety and
depression to violent outbursts
and social withdrawal. Those
in treatment are faring better,
though many have avoided it.
Teenagers, in the age-old effort
to fit in, are most prone to
keeping quiet about the
horrific way their parents died.

In one of the most powerful
and challenging experiences,
hundreds of the youngest
children — those who were
toddlers three years ago — are
only beginning to grasp the
meaning of death, the fact that
their missing fathers and
mothers will never return. But
all the children of September
11 are bound by one thing: the
burden of mourning a private
loss that is historic in stature.

Many of the children watched
the attacks on television. Year
after year, they are confronted
with a ceaseless ambush of
reminders — at the movies, in
classroom banter, on a poster
at the supermarket.

To the children, these are
not the well-worn images of
towers falling and planes
crashing, but the deeply intimate,
devastating scenes of a
parent's death. "It was seeing
my dad die over and over and
over again," said Sarah Van
Auken, 15, whose father,
Kenneth Van Auken, worked at
Cantor Fitzgerald.

How these children will
compare with those who have
lost parents in other traumatic
events — from car crashes and
natural disasters to genocidal
wars — remains an open question.

Even the most basic fact
about the September 11
children — their numbers —
remained elusive for years: an
estimated 1596 people, more
than half of the victims, were
parents, and they left behind at
least 2990 children who were
under 18 at the time of the
attacks, according to preliminary
data compiled by Dr
Claude Chemtob, a clinical
professor of psychiatry and
pediatrics at the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine.

The children are concentrated
in New York and New
Jersey. Among them are 47
pairs of twins, one set of triplets
and 81 stepchildren. Their
average age at the time of the
attacks was 8½. The data
includes children of the
parents lost on the four aircraft
and at the Pentagon. More
than 100 had not yet been
born when their fathers died.

The registry is incomplete, and
the final tally will probably
exceed 3000. Among the more
ambitious goals of Dr Chemtob's
study is to monitor and
aid the long-term recovery of
the younger set of children.

The most pervasive fear
among one group of children is
that something will happen to
the surviving parent, said Dr
Cynthia Pfeffer, a psychiatry
professor at Cornell University's
Weill Medical College
who has been following more
than 70 of the children.
"Some have told us they
were afraid Osama bin Laden
was lurking in their backyards."